And it isn't true. That's the prevailing factory wage in China, but workers on Apple assembly lines get $2.80 an hour and cannot work more than ten hours. . . including overtime. They are also limited in overtime. . . which they were quite upset about. The workers want to work overtime.
A shift of workers threatened mass suicide when they learned their overtime was going to be limited to twenty hours a month!
I was in the Yucatan with a hard Left Mexican gal. She was out to show me all the harm US companies and their maquiladoras were causing in Mexico. She drove me out to the hut of the wife of one of the workers. They were both Mayan and had two kids, a little boy and girl.
This family of four lived in obvious squalor. Their stone hut was about 14 feet by 5 feet. The family slept on four hammocks. The front door was wooden slats and the rear just a cloth strung across it. The roof was thatch. My friend opened with a lament about the maquiladoras and asked the lady to tell me all about it.
The wife goes on to wax poetic about her husband’s job. My Lefty friend blanched. The wife showed us that they could now afford the electrical hook up. They had a mini television to watch and also a radio. Two items they’d never enjoyed, let alone the electricity. Her house was tidy and the interior, though small and rustic, was well-kept.
She then took us out the back door to a patio with a corrugated metal roof her husband had built out of his wages. It was constructed around a fireplace with a chimney used to cook outside. This was her real pride and joy. It used to be that her house was full of smoke from cooking and in bad weather with all of them in the home it was miserable. Now she never got smoke in the house and they had a space about half the size of their house in which to cook and eat and relax, even during heavy rains.
My friend was quiet the whole drive back. I hoped she’d learnt something, but she didn’t. She still clung to her beliefs (and that’s exactly what they were, a religious belief that capitalism is bad) and just ignored the evidence.
These kinds of incremental changes are what make life better. They lost no liberty at the hands of a welfare state. They lost no pride of self and sense of ability at the hands of government bureaucrats. Yes, they were strikingly impoverished relative to both of us and live in a way I’ve only seen in the deep countryside, yet they were happy and felt the direct influence of self-made progress.
Isn’t that what we really want for the poor?